Many of the names would make people’s foreheads pucker, wondering what had happened to them. They had burnt bright, been talented and charming and charismatic, made the cover of Vanity Fair, seemed on track for stellar careers. The answer, of course, was Jared. Jared had happened to them.
If a male director or producer was a predator, he just had to tell him that the women wouldn’t bend over the casting couch. If the guy had some scruples, he spread the word that the women who had rejected him were unreliable, emotional, difficult, that word which attaches so stickily to a female that it’s almost impossible to peel it from your skin. There were so many easy women to choose from; why pick difficult when you didn’t need to?
No one ever made it off the blacklist.
But I wasn’t looking at the screen. I was seeing her, Siobhan Black, the name that had been at the top of the headshot. Irish, with a whole list of accents. She could ride a horse, drive a carriage, play the violin, cycle and rollerblade, had basic screen combat training.
Well, she wouldn’t need any of those for the nun script. The part mostly required the nun to lie on her back, crying and screaming while she was being gang raped. It was one of the hottest scripts of the year: young women were lining up to compete for it.
It was called ‘Ave Maria’, and it was written by an older English director, who was well known for his defiantly eccentric films, often involving a great deal of nudity, featuring malleable up-and-coming actresses who would be unlikely to push back against unscripted additions or ‘improvisations’ he might make once shooting started. He had been struggling for a while, falling out of fashion, making films that seemed almost wilfully obscure.
Realising that, he had cleverly come up with this pitch. Jared loved it. All his male cohorts loved it. Ostensibly, it made a strong feminist statement: a young nun was raped to death by monks in the Middle Ages as punishment for defying their authority and trying to save a witch they were persecuting. The witch was forced to watch the rapes before being burned to death; she and the nun then proceeded to haunt the monastery, their ghosts increasingly vengeful, inflicting a series of nightmares and hallucinations on the monks, turning them against each other with grisly results.
It was a horror art film, by far the director’s most commercial idea to date. But, of course, it wasn’t merely the potential returns that so powerfully attracted Jared. He was licking his lips at the prospect of the auditions. One thin young vulnerable white woman after another, lying on the floor of a rehearsal room, feigning being raped, sobbing, pleading, struggling; stripping down in front of Jared, the director, the casting director, Jared’s buddies at Parador, a couple of money men, so they could ‘see if she looked physically right for the role’; and then, if Jared liked them, trooping into his office, his suite at the Plaza or the Ritz Carlton, nervous but reassured by the presence of one of his wing women. Until she had to take that urgent phone call.
Or me. I must be honest. I had been summoned to those suites several times when the wing women weren’t available. I knew what was expected of me, and I did it. It was part of my job.
But this time...
I don’t know why Siobhan Black affected me so much. She was part of a long, long line of young women just like her. No, not like her.
Who knows why one face in particular calls out to you? After the myriad faces I’d seen spread out on Jared’s desk, a smorgasbord of availability, who knows why hers and hers alone affected me so much? I never had a type. Never felt especially drawn to strong straight eyebrows or white skin or light blue eyes limned in darker blue. It wasn’t her looks, though of course I was drawn to beauty; who isn’t? It was something in her gaze.
Maybe she reminded me of my first-ever crush, but who was that? How can I possibly remember? Some little girl at kindergarten, sitting opposite me on the bus, playing with me at the sandpit at the local park? Features that imprinted on me, formed some image of my ideal woman before I was even able to remember, some alchemical combination of elegance and strength, straight eyebrows, pointed chin? A babysitter, a friend of my parents, a next door neighbour?
Perhaps there was never a template. Perhaps it was just her, Siobhan herself. Something in the way she looked at the camera, something that made me fall in love with her without knowing anything about her. If so, she would be a wondrous success as an actress. I couldn’t be the only one in whom she stirred these feelings, this need, this desperate compulsion to protect her from a predator who had stared at her photograph and licked his lips and stroked himself through his trousers, picturing her naked on his leather sofa.
There was a commotion just outside my office, and I braced myself, recognising the particular quality of bustle and noise. A few seconds later in swept Mrs Van Stratten, over six foot tall and looking, as always, like a finalist for Miss World in the Trophy Wife dress category, hair over fur over silk over skinny jeans over heels barely thicker than a darning needle, on which she moved as easily as if she were barefoot.
Gold and diamonds dripped from her ears, her throat, and her wrists, and flashed from the designer sunglasses holding back her thick blonde-streaked tresses. Behind her trailed the Van Stratten twins, a matched pair of five year-old boys which were biologically hers but had been carried by another woman, as Natalia Van Stratten’s IBS had prevented her from being able to do so.
I know. Me neither.
They were adorable children, if you liked that kind of thing, which I didn’t. Each was shadowed by his own nanny, silent Filipinas whose eyes never left their respective charges.
“His door’s closed, Mrs Van Stratten,” I said, but she had already come to a halt in the middle of the room.
Natalia Van Stratten knew the situation perfectly well, had served her time, I had been told, as an aspirant actress on a previous incarnation of that sofa. Now she was happily ensconced in Jared’s twenty-two million dollar penthouse in one of the Richard Meier-designed towers on the edge of the West Village, the twins and nannies sequestered on the lower floor of the duplex. She gave him respectability, accompanied him to red carpet events and premieres, trotted out the children when he needed family friendly publicity, wore the latest designers and smiled a lot in public.
In private, she compensated for the smiling.
“Ugh!” she complained, frowning as much as her Botox permitted. “I need to talk to him right away! The doctor rang me and he’s skipped his appointment again!”
I knew that, of course. I had texted his driver to confirm, and reminded Jared first thing that morning and an hour before the car was due. Then I had given him a ten minute prompt, at which point he told me to fuck off because he wasn’t fucking going.
“You should have made him go!” she ranted, and I nodded in agreement with her, because what alternative did I have?
“I’m so sorry,” I said humbly, and as I did, I noticed one of the nannies shoot the other a glance that said: Look, they yell at the white women just like they do with us for completely unreasonable things we can’t do anything about. It’s not personal.
“It’s important!” Natalia said, stamping her foot. “This crazy new diet’s putting such a strain on his kidneys the doctor says he needs to stop it immediately! It could be dangerous!”